A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

USB 3.0 ready or not, here we come!

So we wanted to show everyone how committed we are to USB 3.0:

This is the Gigabyte head office in Xindian, Taipei County. As you can see we’ve covered the side of the building with a massive USB 3.0 Onboard Acceleration poster which at first, I must admit, I thought was a little over the top. However a recent discussion with our product managers revealed just how many USB 3.0 motherboards we’re shipping…

We have been selling USB 3.0 motherboards since October 2009 and are on track to achieve shipments of 1 million or more by the end of Q1, 2010! Our information is that Gigabyte’s volumes of USB 3.0 controller chips from NEC are larger than any other single vendor, so we seem to be more committed to the spec than other brands at this point. One of the reasons for the quick uptake of our USB 3.0 motherboards is that we are launching more mainstream models and, of course, volumes are higher in the mainstream than at the high end. A full list of models is available here.

Skeptics will say that USB 3.0 devices will only be available in the 2nd half of 2010 so why the hurry to push the technology now? I believe that there is another very important market driver that is helping us sell more USB 3.0 boards: the desktop motherboard industry is enjoying growth due to the global economic recovery together with the long awaited Windows 7 upgrade cycle… Upgraders generally look to ‘future proof’ their purchase as much as possible, and so its just logical to choose a USB 3.0 motherboard over one with only USB 2.0.